A song of pure happiness III by Li Bai

Lovely now toget her, his lady and his Rowers
Lighten for ever the Emperor 's eye,
As he li stens to the sighing of the far spring wind
Where she leans on a railing in the Aloe Pavilion.

Original Poem

「清平调 · 其三」
名花倾国两相欢，常得君王带笑看。
解释春风无限恨，沈香亭北倚阑干。

李白

Interpretation

This poem is the final piece in the trilogy of "A song of pure happiness" composed on the same occasion. If the first two poems praise Consort Yang’s beauty from the dimensions of the immortal realm and history, this one pulls the perspective completely back to the present, focusing on the most touching moment at the Aloeswood Pavilion: the deep affection between the emperor and his consort. With effortless strokes, Li Bai sketches a minimalist scene, offering the highest tribute to this royal romance while also drawing the entire suite to a close with a lingering, resonant cadence.

First Couplet: “名花倾国两相欢，常得君王带笑看。”
Mínghuā qīngguó liǎng xiāng huān, cháng dé jūnwáng dài xiào kàn.
Rare flower and kingdom-toppling beauty share mutual delight; Often the sovereign gazes, smiling with fondness bright.

The phrase “mutual delight” is the soul of the poem. It is no longer one-sided praise (of the flower’s or the beauty’s loveliness) but highlights the harmonious, joyful, and mutually fulfilling relationship among the “rare flower” (peony), the “kingdom-toppling beauty” (Consort Yang), and the “sovereign” (Emperor Xuanzong). The flower gains spirit from the person, the person gains grace from the flower, and the sovereign is content in the harmony of this scene. The detail “gazes, smiling with fondness” restores Xuanzong from a majestic emperor to an admirer and lover enchanted by beauty, creating a warm, vivid picture.

Second Couplet: “解释春风无限恨，沈香亭北倚阑干。”
Jiěshì chūnfēng wúxiàn hèn, Shěnxiāng Tíng běi yǐ lángān.
It dispels spring breeze’s boundless regret, all sorrow’s trace; North of the Aloeswood Pavilion, she leans on the rail with grace.

This couplet deepens the conception, elevating the emotion to its peak. “Dispels” means to dissolve, to resolve. “Spring breeze’s boundless regret” is a profoundly poetic paradox: the spring breeze should be gentle, so why “regret”? Here, “regret” can be understood as the faint melancholy of spring’s fleeting beauty and fleeting joy, or the ineffable wistfulness of life’s vicissitudes. The perfect scene before them—the mutual delight among person, flower, and sovereign—holds the power to dissolve all sorrow. The concluding line, “North of the Aloeswood Pavilion, she leans on the rail with grace,” is like a frozen cinematic shot, eternally imprinting Consort Yang’s leisurely, elegant, and blissful posture in the poetry and in the memory of the High Tang. What she leans against is not just the railing but the emperor’s favor and the perfection of the moment.

Holistic Appreciation

As the concluding piece of the trilogy, this poem demonstrates the highest level of artistic mastery: revealing depth within perfection, containing movement within stillness. Without employing any mythological or historical allusions, the poem relies purely on plain depiction of the immediate scene, yet achieves the effect where “silence speaks more powerfully than sound.” The phrase “mutual delight” precisely captures the harmonious realm created by Emperor Xuanzong, Consort Yang, the peony (and indeed the entire spring)—offering the most elegant and fitting tribute to the love between the imperial couple.

Yet, Li Bai’s profundity lies exactly here. When he portrays bliss to its extreme—as in “dispelling the boundless regret carried by the spring breeze”—a latent philosophical reflection on time and destiny naturally emerges. What requires such supreme joy to “dispel” is precisely the omnipresent “boundless regret.” This casts an exceedingly faint premonitory shadow over this ecstatic scene—an intimation of the inevitable decline that follows prosperity—lending the poem, beneath its dazzling and radiant surface, a tone of cool profundity. It thus aligns perfectly with the opulent yet subtly melancholic complexity that characterizes the entire "Qing Ping Diao" suite.

Artistic Merits

• Harmonious Aesthetics of a Trinity: Successfully constructs a trinity aesthetic model of “rare flower—beauty—sovereign,” where the three reflect and enhance each other, together forming a classic moment of High Tang court aesthetics.
• Deepening Conception through Paradoxical Diction: The combination of “spring breeze” and “boundless regret” creates emotional tension, greatly expanding the line’s connotation, allowing joy and latent worry to coexist.
• Art of Concluding with Scene-Bound Emotion: The poem ends with the static image of “leaning on the rail,” a powerful visual tableau that solidifies all emotion, admiration, and contemplation within a single gesture. Meaning lingers beyond the words, achieving a closing tone of light yet potent restraint.
• Perfect Climax of the Trilogy’s Structure: As the final poem, it returns from immortal reverie (first poem) and historical comparison (second poem) to the contemplation of the present (third poem), completing an emotional circuit from the abstract to the concrete, from the external to the internal.

Insights

“A song of pure happiness III” lets us glimpse what constitutes a “pinnacle moment of happiness.” It teaches us that what human emotion and art can capture and celebrate are precisely such perfect moments of complete integration of body, mind, and setting. However, the poem’s deeper insight may be this: the pinnacle of perfection itself contains a keen awareness of “imperfection.” The line “dispels spring breeze’s boundless regret” is like a beam of wisdom, illuminating the intrinsic connection between joy and sorrow. It reminds us to fully immerse ourselves in life’s beautiful moments while retaining a clarity and composure regarding the passage of time and the impermanence of worldly affairs. Li Bai’s greatness lies in his ability to depict his era’s most splendid scene with genius strokes while allowing later generations to glimpse, within that scene, universal human experience and eternal philosophical reflection on life.

Poem translator

Kiang Kanghu

About the poet

Li Bai (李白), 701 - 762 A.D., whose ancestral home was in Gansu, was preceded by Li Guang, a general of the Han Dynasty. Tang poetry is one of the brightest constellations in the history of Chinese literature, and one of the brightest stars is Li Bai.